Singing into Language (Co-created with Achol Baroch): Creating a Public Pedagogy

Abstract

This chapter examines Achol’s film Singing into Language, and its relationship to the evolving notion of public pedagogies. The film and commentary explore the potential of alternative pedagogies, which include digital and popular culture, to engage teachers and learners with one another in collaborative pedagogical methods. Achol’s advice for teachers points to the work of Dimitriadis (2002) and involves what Giroux calls a ‘spectrum of social practices’ (1994) utilising a variety of media platforms. Achol’s foreshortened experience of western schools never matched her expectations from her days in transit from South Sudan. When she was denied streaming into mainstream high schools due to inadequate English language skills, Achol began to think and act creatively in her approaches to learning.

The category of border also prefigures cultural criticism and pedagogical processes as a form of border crossing. That is, it signals forms of transgression in which existing borders forged in domination can be challenged and redefined. Second, it also speaks to the need to create pedagogical conditions in which students become border crossers in order to understand otherness in its own terms, and to further create borderlands in which diverse cultural resources allow for the fashioning of new identities within existing configurations of power. (Giroux 1992/2005b:20)